Influences and Methodological Divergences between Husserl and Stein

Elucidates the mutual philosophical influences between Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein by examining the manifestation of phenomenological topics in the two thinkers’ work.

During Edith Stein’s assistantship with Husserl between 1916 and 1918, she came across manuscripts which were published many years after she resigned from her job with Husserl. It was Stein’s task to edit and systematically organize the manuscripts. This work method, which was otherwise determined by Husserl, resulted in an ambivalent interpretation of Stein’s work as the assistant of Husserl. The new publication of Husserl’s Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy II, in which there is a separation of Husserl’s original contextual concept from Stein’s editorial initiatives, calls into question the influence that Stein’s thought likewise had on Husserl’s philosophy. This volume hypothesizes that the phenomenological influence on Stein could rather be interpreted as a mutual influence between Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl, i.e. Stein had also had an influence on Husserl’s thinking at the beginning of the 1920s.